SC Man Seeks to Restore Grandfather’s Honor, 75 Years after Pearl Harbor

.......I think our 250 year Navy tradition is that the Commanding Officer is responsible NO MATTER WHAT!

Yah,I can understand that...to a degree at least.But that assumes that *anyone* is to blame.Was there *any* reason at all to expect an attack like that? I've read suggestions that FDR knew something like that would happen but allowed it to happen as the only way to convince the country that we must enter the war.If that's true were senior commanders *informed* of this possibility?

As I said...I got to E-5.I never got anywhere near the officers who had scrambled eggs on their hats.So my opinion may very well be 100% foolish.

There are a lot of learned articles and some books that claim FDR knew all about it and there are some that claim radar warnings were ignored and basically that the base was sort of “asleep” that early Sunday morning.

Kudo’s to the Navy for holding fast in concept at least to “ACCOUNTABILITY” while the rest of our society goes straight to hell punishing nobody, in political circles I mean, and handing out participation trophies.

..........another item this concept would accomplish is that the POTUS could fly around in an unmarked C-5, of which there are hundreds, instead of the bright and shiny please shoot me down Air Force One.

I think the president flying around in a “please shoot me down airplane” are over.

Also, my guess is that the module could easily be 6,000 sf.

The air of unreality pervading MacArthur’s command in the Philippines is further evidenced by his share buying as the Japanese neared Manila. With Japanese troops closing in on the capital, MacArthur telephoned the mayor of Manila, Jorge Vargas, from Corregidor on 28 December and asked him to buy $35,000 worth of shares in the Lepanto mining company for him. Vargas executed the transaction for MacArthur on the following day. Many years later, Vargas recalled that this single share transaction during the critical stages of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines made MacArthur a millionaire by the end of the war.

Suspecting that his military reputation and career had been compromised by his failing defence of the Philippines, MacArthur spent his first two weeks on Corregidor pestering President Quezon for rewards for his “distinguished service” to the Philippines. Quezon was terminally ill and racked with anxiety for the fate of his countrymen. He was in no fit state to resist MacArthur’s demands. He also believed that his best hope for continued American support lay with MacArthur, and he responded to MacArthur’s pressure for rewards by granting him the sum of $500,000 from the impoverished Philippine Treasury on Corregidor. In today’s values, the gift to MacArthur would have been worth in excess of $5,000,000. MacArthur’s closest staff officers received smaller sums.

These gifts of large sums of money from the Philippine’s Treasury to serving officers of the United States Army were grossly improper, but Roosevelt and Secretary for War Stimson elected to turn a blind eye even though they were aware of the payments. When Quezon had escaped from the Philippines, he visited Washington and offered General Dwight D. Eisenhower $60,000 for “distinguished service” during Eisenhower’s time in the Philippines as MacArthur’s chief of staff. Eisenhower politely declined the improper gift.

The corrupt politicians and the history books have McArthur a wartime hero....but the truth is he cared much less for America than he did for his own financial well being.

He should have been court martialed and shot!

In fairness (however minor), let’s remember that War Plan Orange called specifically for the American forces to retreat to the Bataan Peninsula—a redoubt that served also to bottle up Manila Bay—and hold out there for the planned relief convoy sailing out of Hawaii. And MacArthur believed probably up until he got to Australia that it would be coming, because Washington was lying to him about it all along. Washington had been trying to think of a more viable way of defending the Philippines since at least 1928; as of December 1941 they still hadn’t worked up a better solution.

In any event, even while losing in the Bataan campaign, our boys fared far better than the rest of the Allied forces in the Pacific. The British in Malaya, for instance, were overrun in a matter of weeks; the Japanese had to bring in reinforcements to defeat the Bataan and Corregidor forces, after taking nearly twice as long as planned, and the Japanese general in command (one of their best,actually) saw his career come to a premature end for such a debacle.

75 minutes before the Japanese attack commenced, the USS Ward sunk a Japanese submarine trying to enter Pearl Harbor. The report of this was ignored because there was no one on duty coordinating defense before 800 hours. Radar operators saw enemy planes and their officer told them to ignore this. Kimmel and Short were given a war warning on November 27th. They chose to ignore it or imagine it only referred to the Philippines. Pearl Harbor had been sucessfully attacked by carriers in war games over a decade before the Japanese attack. Kimmel and Short were guilty of gross negligence and deriliction of duty. Kimmel was lucky that the US Navy did not follow 18th century British policy and hang derilict officers “pour encourager les autres.”

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